We’ve all been there! You are sitting at your desk innocently working away when all of a sudden a meeting invite arrives with the subject line “Dashboard Requirements Meeting”. Your first instinct may be “awesome, a new project AND they have requirements, or at least want to talk about them! Better than the last time when they just gave me a dataset with no requirements and say ‘make a dashboard’ right?”
You arrive at the meeting and the discussion begins… oh no… now what?
Can you make this look like Excel?
Over the summer I wrote an extensive blog post on this very topic mainly because it is the most common request I’ve seen. The TL/DR of that post is that you have multiple strategies you can employ to avoid this request which includes:
- Find someone above the requestor in the hierarchy who receive this data and see what they want and try and convince them to go visual
- Find an evangelist who loves data visualization and will help encourage their peers to move away from the tabular approach
- Present an alternative view – create their tabular request and an actionable dashboard, and present the dashboard first.
- Subtly add some preattentive attributes to their tabular report so you ease them into data visualization
This is hard do to the fact that people hate change and Excel is the warm comfy blanket that comes with hot chocolate and marshmallows… and no one wants to have their blanket and hot chocolate taken away from them! It’s like dealing with a small child, encouraging them they don’t need a night light, and then they don’t need you to tuck them in. Do it gradually and eventually, they will forget all about tabular reports… maybe.
What I want is a pie chart (or whatever chart is the flavor of the month)… OR This visual has to be this chart type! (It’s completely the wrong chart type)
When stakeholders are asking for specific chart types, or the wrong chart types it can be frustrating. This is all about education and again, comfort with what they may know. Pie charts are as common as dirt, and generally, they are as replaceable with something better. Educating your stakeholders on “Right Chart, Right Time” can be a huge game-changer. My favorite tool for this has become the Visual Vocabulary created by Andy Kriebel (adapted from the Financial Times). Set it up as a lunch and learn, based around data literacy, for anyone who wishes to attend is possible. Talk about chart selection, with a good dose of “it depends”. Stakeholders are demanding, but the more knowledge they have, the better chance you have. Hopefully, you get to a point where they just ask the question of the data, and leave the design to you.
As a side note, if they are asking for a new chart type, and it makes sense for the data question being asked, make sure you include somewhere on the dashboard a “rosetta stone” on how to interpret the chart so it’s consumed correctly.
Please color each category (there are 20+) on the dashboard.
Overuse of color is such a common issue, mainly because it so so easy to do in Tableau! You can drop any field on the Color of the Marks Card and “BAM!” you’ve got color. If everything is colored, nothing is colored. My advice, if coloring a value is required give the user a mechanism to highlight one or two categories at a time. Using a parameter in this situation allows color to be applied with care, and adds a nice level of interactivity. If they have particular values they always look at, encourage them to set up custom views on Server for quick and easy access.
I want all these metrics on a single dashboard (there are 20+)
Here is a very “Zen Moment” question. If all your metrics are on one dashboard, but you have to scroll horizontally and vertically to see the content, is it really on “one dashboard”? Do you scroll on your car’s dashboard to see all the metrics? NO! Best practices suggest to us that we put a maximum of 6 metrics on a dashboard (as always, it depends) so that the user doesn’t get analysis paralysis. If the metrics are not related, and the potential for false correlation is present, those items should be separated on to different dashboards. With the addition of navigation buttons in Tableau, moving between those dashboards is a breeze! You can even use actions to move between dashboards if you need to drill down or filter subsequent dashboards. You are only limited by your creativity, so use it!
How do I export to Excel?
Why do you want to export it to Excel? That’s the question. If they want the ability to build their own analysis based on the data, maybe set them up with an Explorer license and some Web Authoring training! Keeping the data in Tableau is the best way to manage your data governance because once it’s in the wild you have no idea what’s happening to it. Giving the users the ability to self-serve in a governed area is an amazing option over exporting it to Excel. If they say they don’t have time for that, ask them how long they spend playing with the data in Excel. If the answer is “I copy and paste it into a template and I have this set of visuals simple beat them to death with a blunt object ask them to see if that can be created in Tableau so you can save them some time.